


let our minds run round in circles while we figure it all out

by constant_vellichor



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, Pre-S&S, lucretia is, the avi/johann isnt the focus btw, this started off as something completely different but thats fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 10:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17806196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constant_vellichor/pseuds/constant_vellichor
Summary: The members of the Bureau of Balance see and know more than Lucretia realises. But it'll be fine.





	let our minds run round in circles while we figure it all out

**Author's Note:**

> Happy International Fanworks Day! I present to you all this forgotten WIP I finished, freshened up, and now gift to all of you. Enjoy!

When the members of the Bureau of Balance talk about the Director, it’s with respect and trust and a little bit of reverence and a little bit of fear.

They don’t talk about her often- they have friends and hobbies and emotions and family and lives outside of their jobs that it seems the Director has not had in a very, very long time- but her presence is always felt, there on the second moon, and it’s inevitable that she occasionally comes up in conversation.

The thing is, nobody at the Bureau really knows anything about their employer at all, except what they’ve picked up from observation during guard shifts and audiences and good old-fashioned snooping. Around the long trestle tables in the canteen, or over the counters at the Fantasy Costco, or through heavy curtains in a dorm, a sleepover with rumours drifting through dusty velvet.

The most curious about her go to Lucas Miller, when they can find him or distract him or drag him away from his lab or, occasionally, pull him from the maw of an experimental elevator.

“You’ve known her the longest,” they say.

“What’s she like, when she’s not the Director? Does she have a family? Friends?”

And, most often-

“What’s her name?”

Lucas doesn’t tell them. Mostly, he doesn’t know himself.

He’s been acquainted with the Director for years- since she was a young woman with a titanium spine and disarming brown eyes, and a confusing combination of premature wrinkles- laughter lines around her eyes paired with creases across her furrowed brow from worrying too much too quickly. He knows this is the woman he first saw, the woman who held out a weathered, dark-skinned hand with a writer’s callus on her middle finger and introduced herself as _just Lucretia_. Lucas _knows_ that’s how he first saw her- he’s a scientist, he’s been trained from childhood to collect and recall qualitative data, and the Lucretia he’d first met couldn’t have been any older than twenty-two.

But he’d seen her look like that only the once.

The next time he’d seen Lucretia, she’d been his mother’s age and hunched over a white oak staff, faltering a little when she walked over to shake his hand for the second time, like her brain and her body weren’t quite acquainted. She’d looked at him with eyes gone grey as slate and asked him to build her a moon, and he’d accepted.

Lucas is more familiar with the Director than most. But that doesn’t mean he understands.

~~~

Others- those who don’t know Lucas- go to Avi- one of the original Bureau members, and the best and only man to see for gossip on the field trips employees occasionally take off of the second moon. They ask him,

“Does she ever take cannons?"

And after that, “Where does she _go_?”

Most of the time, Avi nervously pushes loose strands of hair from his ponytail back behind his ear and says _she doesn’t go anywhere, she lives here, she’s the_ Director _, this is her life’s work, where would she need to go?_

Most of the time he doesn’t mention the times he’s stumbled drunk into the hangar so late it was early and found a cannonball missing. Or the set of enchanted steel doors embedded in the hangar wall, covered by a Bureau of Balance tapestry, that he hasn’t yet found any key to open, and give him a shaky, sick feeling when he steps too close. Or the day he first arrived at the moon base- he and the rest of the new employees took cannonballs up to a campus empty but for the Director and her little assistant Davenport- completely empty. The initiation ogres and the stock at the Fantasy Costco and even the furniture had come later, shuttled back and forth by their limited cannonballs. But Avi still has no idea how Madam Director got herself and her butler up there- he might not be much of a magic user, but he knows Teleport- or any other spell, for that matter- can’t get you that far.

He does tell one person, though- Magnus Burnsides, Captain Reclaimer and Avi’s occasional workout buddy, shows up sweaty and pale at Avi’s room the night after he reclaims the Temporal Chalice, one fist clenched and the other tightly clutching a scroll. Avi reluctantly disentangles himself from Johann’s sleepy embrace and leans against the doorframe, squinting blearily at his friend.

“Uh. Hey there, bud-“

“I need you to tell me everything you know about the Director.”

Magnus looks- rigid. Unyielding. There’s no joy there, none of the usual humour and affability- just that voice, hard and brittle like carbon fibre. Parchment crumbling against clammy palms.

So Avi sits him down at the little card table shoved against the wall of the dorm, and Johann makes awful fantasy instant coffee in the coffeemaker neither of them quite know how to work yet and digs out most of an ancient packet of Fantasy Oreos, and Avi looks across at the bloodshot, desperate eyes of the man before him and tells all.

~~~

Johann watches Avi and Magnus talk, fingers plucking at the E string of his favourite rosewood violin in a nervous tic, knee bouncing so hard it occasionally hits the bedside table and jostles a pile of mostly-unfinished compositions Johann is trying very hard not to look at. Sitting a few feet away at the beat-up card table he’d dragged with him for game nights when he moved in is Avi, talking far too loudly and animatedly for Johann’s taste at _two-thirty in the fucking morning_. But- if Johann’s being honest with himself (and he tries not to be, too often) it’s not the volume of the conversation that bothers him so much as it is the topic.

They’re talking about the Director. And not just talking about her- _examining_ her. Deliberating on everything they know about her. Putting it together piecemeal, like a shitty puzzle you win at a Solstice carnival and try to fit together even though you’ve lost half the pieces and the ones that are left don’t fit. And Johann’s listening, but not kidding himself- his bits of the puzzle aren’t helping much.

Because he _does_ have pieces, and lots of them. Nobody asks Johann, when they go looking for stories about the Director- he’s too sullen, too sarcastic, too unapproachable, skin too sallow from time spent underground tending a creature most of them prefer not to think about too hard.

Johann, as much as he loves the Voidfish, doesn’t like to think about it too hard either.

When he does, mostly when he’s been sitting tired with his back against his best friend’s tank for what feels like years and his brain feels beer-battered and deep-fried and he can’t keep everything at bay like he usually can, he remembers the tea, and he remembers Lucretia.

Johann remembers-

_A pencil in his hand, dirty and beginning to split down the middle, and a lament in his ears, melancholy and exquisite. Scribbling notes on the back of a receipt from the Fantasy Costco he’d dug out of his pantaloons. The Voidfish lit up like a Candlenights bush, luminous tentacles spiralling around each other frantically, dragging against its tank in agitated caresses._

_Dropping the receipt on the floor music side up and grabbing the neck of his second-favourite violin, the maple one. Rosin on the bow, and then he’s playing, the Voidfish chiming in a second later with its own melody. And-_

_And it almost sounds like it’s sobbing._

_And then Johann had looked down at the notes he’d written, and that’s where everything had gone slippery and staticky. Memories warped, melted like burnt and boiled skin, like a chocolate bar left out in the sun too long. I_

_t’s been months, and Johann still can’t remember the song he’d been playing, or even the notes he’d written down. But he can still recall- the sensation of them. That feeling of revelation, like he’d just had an epiphany decades in the making, like something had clicked into place._

_He’d stuffed the receipt back into his pocket, thrown down his violin with force that would make his childhood tutor wince, and gone striding for the Director’s office with purpose in his steps he’d never had before._

_He’d banged on the door and Davenport had opened it, the gnome’s cheerful expression fading as he took in Johann’s countenance, the set of his elongated ears, flattened out with anger and shock and reproach at something Johann can’t fucking remember. Davenport had ushered him into the room and he’d stalked up to the Director’s chair and- static. All his words, all hers, were static in his mind. The memory had gone- choppy from there, interspersed with gaps that made it hard to follow. But he remembered the shock in Lucretia’s face as he’d talked, how she’d gotten up and turned on her heel into her private quarters and come back with tea of all things. It had been scalding hot and sickly sweet, but he had drunk it anyway. Lucretia had been speaking, but the memory had turned fuzzy in a different way as the edges of his vision flickered black, as whatever she’d put in his tea worked on him all too quickly. Lucretia stood up as Johann’s eyes fluttered closed and his joints locked up, and he could have sworn that static in his memory lifted just long enough for him to hear her say “I’m sorry.”_

_He’d woken up in his dorm the next day, something crackling against his thigh as he turned over, mouth dry and tasting of chicory. He’d pulled the crumpled receipt out of his pocket and turned it over._

_Every note, every word, nearly every memory of the day before had been drowned in amnesia. And Lucretia hadn’t spoken to him since._

Magnus and Avi are still talking, a muffled drone under the phantom static still crackling in Johann’s ears. He looks at the compositions splayed out on the bedside table again, thinks about the receipt hidden in the pile.

Johann does not love easily, or freely. Avi, the Voidfish and his music are enough for him, all of them wrapped up in one another. And Johann’s not brave, either- not like Killian or Carey or Magnus is. But- Lucretia took something from Johann. Took something from the Voidfish. And likely took something from Magnus too, for him to show up here so late at night, whatever he isn’t saying or, maybe, doesn’t yet know.

Johann is not a brave man, nor an affectionate, one, but he rises from his place on the rumpled covers of their bed and pulls up a third chair at the battered card table. And the first thing he says is,

“You want to know about Lucretia? You gotta talk to the Voidfish.”

~~~

She knows she should erase Junior completely. Having them exist unerased is a threat to her plan in the first place, having someone know- having _Johann_ know they exist could be _catastrophic_. Or it would have been, she reminds herself. The tea, the words on the little slip of hastily scrawled parchment did their job well.

_Johann knows about the second Voidfish._

She’d torn out a page of one of her diaries and written them down with the closest quill and inkwell she could find, under the guise of making tea in her quarters. The old ink dripped and clumped together on the page, drifted off of the paper into the water of the little tank like smoke, like blood. Junior wrapped their tentacles around the paper and it had disappeared in a gentle pulse of light, a single violet star glowing brightly as Johann forgot.

Just another notch in her memory-stealing belt, Lucretia supposes.

Johann would be fine- she’d dosed him with the same distilled mixture of silverpoint and other substances she’d given her family when it was time to move them. He’d wake up in a few hours, recalling nothing.

It had been a mistake, not erasing Junior’s existence. She’d thought- there was no need to erase anything else, not if only her and Davenport knew about him, the anti-lich wards keeping Lup and Barry away. Logically, she knows she should take her face out of her hands, straighten her body where it had slumped itself in her desk chair, and start hashing out the details of a paragraph to feed to Fisher that would make sure nothing like this could ever happen again.

But.

The only person who spent enough time with the Voidfish to have possibly worked this out was Johann, who she no longer needed to worry about. The probability of anybody else confronting her like Johann had was _astronomically_ small. And if she’s being honest with herself- she wants it to stop. The amnesia she induces every time. She doesn’t want to do it any more than she possibly has to.

So Lucretia stays slumped in that chair, head resting on arms draped across the desk. It’ll be fine. Nobody knows about Junior. Nobody knows about Johann or what she did to him. Nobody knows about the trips she takes, still looking for Lup, and nobody knows about Wonderland or the Starblaster or any of it. Nobody knows about Lucretia, or what she’s done.

Nobody knows her story. It’ll be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from 'Hungover in the City of Dust' by Autoheart, which I finally listened to yesterday and pronounce One Hell Of A Bop. Come yell at me on Tumblr at https://constant-vellichor.tumblr.com/! Chaboy would appreciate the validation. Also, comment and kudo if you enjoyed or else my crops will wither and the villagers will show up at my house with pitchforks and torches


End file.
